Tuesday, November 16, 2010

We haven't been publishing any news for quite a while, but today we have pretty sweet ones!

We are announcing a new GanttProject update with codename Praha. It is a successor of the old good GanttProject 2.0 but with many important updates. Its first alpha version is available for download. It is by far not complete and we will be adding more features and more stability. At the same time we want to make this release cycle short and release the final version of GanttProject Praha as soon as possible.

So, what's new?

What can you try in the first Praha build?

New Microsoft Project import. It should be able to import the most recent MS Project files, and it also supports importing custom properties, project calendar and resource days off.

New timeline which is less cluttered and has navigation and zooming controls built-in.

New weekend option for those who love weekends but have to work 24/7 :). It allows for rendering weekends still counting them as working days. By the way, you can change now weekend setup in your existing projects.

Task end date is now the date when a task finishes, not the next day. So 1 day long task starting on Nov 12 will finish on Nov 12.

Task properties dialog UI was rewritten. Now it looks more professional, and task notes are located next to the main properties.

Additional priority levels

What about Loire?

Well, it turned out that changing that much as had been planned in Loire was impossible. Loire is still in very unstable state while GanttProject absolutely needs a major update. So I decided to build a new version based on 2.0 code. However, many things were backported from Loire and I hope that Praha will eventually evolve to Loire.

Acknowledgements.

Many thanks to Maarten Bezemer whose amazing job on bugs, features and on code cleanup kicked off this development.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

First, many of you have probably noticed that we've got our own forum. This almost finishes our migration from SourceForge. Most of the stuff, including bug and feature tracking, is now hosted on Google Code, and forum is hosted on ganttproject.biz. We're still using SourceForge version control, but we migrated to Mercurial.

Our new forum is similar to SourceForge feature-wise but it is faster and less cluttered than SF. However, another UI and performance was not the only reason to move. We're going to improve web experience of our users, but let me keep the details in secret for now and avoid giving any promises or public commitments.

GanttProject Loire is also alive and evolving in its new Mercurial repository. It is experiencing a major refactoring of almost all important components, which really takes a lot of time and efforts but which is necessary to open up space for extensibility and for new features in task/resource management.